A View on the LOTS Conference

Last week three Infrae people – me, GuidoW, and Eric – went to the LOTS Conference (Let’s Open The Source) in Bern, Switzerland: http://www.lots.ch/2005/

Atmosphere

Snow had covered Munich. We were supposed to transfer there, but
ended up rerouted through Vienna, flying in a cushy business jet to
Bern airport.

Bern is lovely. Reminds me of the Hague, our capital city.
Although, while the Netherlands has land, Switzerland has a landscape,
which goes steeply up and down. The scenery was decorated with
fluttering snow, making everything sparkle and turning edges into
curves. It was cold; soft clouds of breath heightened the enchantment.

The conference was held at the University of Bern.
It occupied two floors of the stately main building. To get to the premises from our hotel, we walked deep underground into the train
station, and took an elevator up through the hill. The Swiss are like
dwarfs, they love tunneling through rock.

The conference was divided into three theme days: Workshop, Professional, and Community Day.

Day 1: Workshopping

Workshop Day was not very busy. We attended an Apache Lenya session for the morning, given by Andreas Hartmann from Wyona.
We were glad we went, because it was educational, inspiring, and
gratifying. Lenya is a powerful system, and seeing how it works ‘under
the hood’ was good for us. Some aspects triggered ideas about how we
can improve Silva,
and the telling realization was we could see the Lenya people dealing
with the same fundamental problems Infrae is: scalability, performance,
code base maintenance, etc. Steering an enterprise-class CMS demands a
structured methodology. It ain’t rapid prototyping no more.

The afternoon was more granular. We ran into some clients we knew, like Benno Luthiger from ETH, and consultant Philipp Schröder. We looked at various sessions: Apache2, a Vida
CMS framework built with PHP, software metrics. We wondered why the
names of so many CMS’s end in ‘a’. Sounds female, we supposed. GuidoW’s laptop died. The screen said: “Fan error”.
Somehow I wasn’t surprised. It followed his expired passport charade at
Schiphol airport.

Day 2: Professionalizing

Professional Day was full of activity. Numerous sponsor companies
had stands in the passages of the two floors. Big names included Novell
with Suse in tow, Sun, and Microsoft, who furnished a CD of open source
UNIX tools. A lot of local companies were present: Puzzle ITC, Leanux.ch, and others I didn’t recognize. From the Python/Zope world, 4teamwork had a stand, with Bernhard Bühlmann and team, who just launched Plone-based bern.ch. Eric manned the Infrae project booth most of the day.

The keynote was from Stefano Mazzocchi of Cocoon
fame. He told a story about “What if...” open source had never
developed. It was scary and effective. Stefano always adapts his
presentations to context, and uses fast tools (Apple laptop) to create
them. This one had a handwritten font that developed the tale line by
line. A while back I saw a completely different talk, where he used
gorgeous photos to trigger visionary musing about the future. See him.

I did presentations for the Railroad and Silva, and Guido did a Kupu
presentation. After Guido’s talk, he told us he was totally nervous. It
didn’t show, which means he’s broken through to where talking to a
crowd is provocative. Like trying to pick up a girl (he’ll understand
that) (not that he did anything of the sort, Suus ;-)

The Silva and Railroad presentations, well, all of them, were
underattended. The worst case was Michael Wechner, who did a talk on OSCOM.
Two people showed up. Then two more, one of which turned out to be a
journalist and the other his photographer. They took pictures and left.
Michael found the positive: obviously most of the people at
the conference already knew about OSCOM.

The Railroad Repository
talk provoked some smart questions. Railroad solves a fundamental load
problem, common to all high-performance installations, and the talk was
effective, since the questioners were from different technological
camps. It proved the repository has potential for various application
servers.

A half hour talk zooms by. Always treat your presentation like a
newspaper article, with the most important stuff first. Then you can
bail out if circumstances demand it. For the Silva talk I skipped the
low-level technical stuff, which probably wasn’t news anyway
(model/view/controller architecture, flexible layout system, bla, bla).
During the presentation one guy downloaded and installed Silva on his
PowerBook. Nice to witness Silva’s “out of the box” experience.

Low turnout on Professional Day was a disappointment to everybody.
The organizers expected far more people to show, because they did
triple the marketing this year. LOTS is not the first open source event
I’ve seen with an excellent program but relatively poor attendance. There seems to
be a threshold, where developers hear the message and show, but high
level decision makers don’t take it seriously.

The same content at a major trade show would have packed the
presentation rooms. This may point to packaging, where holding the
conference under the auspices of a university doesn’t promote
confidence. However, a university is often the only cheap venue with proper
facilities. With their limited funds, open source organizations can’t
compete with convention centers. But this leaves a gap in operations
where, to build business, big investments are required, but small
investments don’t produce a return. I suppose the situation is the same
for decision makers: the investment of going to LOTS didn’t seem worth
their time.

Maybe next year’s Professional Day should try and better focus on
the problems professionals face. Here I don’t mean developers, but the
professionals developers want to do business with. There were a host of
small open source companies present, both in stands and in the Projects
area, and they were actively looking for customers. Many potential
clients are concerned about integration and support – since they already
have an existing IT infrastructure – and transitioning, where they are
considering turning over proprietary systems to open source solutions.
If we can showcase subjects like these, more business might happen at
the conference.

Next year the conference will be called FOSS Days. Better, although
acronyms can fall short. Maybe a good tag line will fill it in.

Of course, developers can be professionals too. Maybe the Workshop
Day should be called Developer Day, to differentiate the content. My
two centimes for the LOTS crew :-)

In the evening a speaker’s dinner was organized at a classic Swiss fondue restaurant. Fondue is an icebreaker, delicious social lubrication, a central melting pot.

Day 3: Communing

Community Day was fun, and “Fun matters”, to quote the title of
Benno’s research/talk about the open source development
process.

Although the keynote, from the president of FSF Europe, was not fun,
it was so painful I wanted to crawl out of the hall. “It’s not open
source, it’s not FLOSS....”, yeah, yeah.... I fell asleep and dreamed
about long ago in the Age of Aquarius, when Timothy Leary thought
LSD would change the world. Shudder.

Wyona Pictures’ FUD movie
had torrented onto various laptops, circumventing the copyright problem
with the music. Some of the people in the trailer, like Bertrand
Delacretaz, were present, playing their roles. (I just did ;-)

Bertrand played multiple roles. He was an organizer, and went live at LOTS with his band at the end of the day.

There was a presentation about Zope 3
from Dominik Huber. We didn’t see it, because the room was full (heh).
Previously I didn’t know Dominic, but after talking, I realized I’ve
seen his work, and he’s sharp. He once built some Silva extensions for WSL, a Swiss research institute, and I was amazed at the depth of what he’d done. Meeting him confirmed the good impression.

The icing: Dominic has user interface running for Zope 3. That means
there’s something to see. Wow. That’s not just a milestone, it’s a
breakthrough. Words, wikis, and source code are just vapor. Guess the
cold in Switzerland made it finally crystallize.

GuidoW got a major ego boost. We had an inkling about it already,
but at the conference a guy who’s involved with JSR-170 showed him Kupu
running, integrated into one of the world’s top content management
systems. I haven’t asked permission to cite it yet, thereby the cryptic
public key.

There’s not much more to report besides valuable networking. I met Robert Rottermann of RedCor,
who’s name I’ve heard for years. He’s motivated, doing two long
presentations on two days, sharing knowledge and obvious experience.

Ah, upstairs in the social area of the conference, a PainStation game from etoy.Corporation graced the premises. GuidoW and Eric got burns, increasing electric shocks, and bruised hands from the black rubber hose that whipped them incessently. Eric had the high score until some 13-year old kid came along.

Après-ski

The LOTS team gets the closing kudo. We were totally impressed.
Those guys, a couple girls too, worked really hard to make it all
happen, and pulled it off. From a visitor’s standpoint, everything
flowed. Well done.

I talked with most of the organizers. They’re all busy with various
endeavors, and took time out from studies or working/running a company
to produce the conference. Good people. I’d like to do business with
them.

That’s part of the challenge small software enterprises face. How can you
retain your agility, yet compete with giants. Some company/communities
are looking for a way to band together, share knowledge, realize
economies of scale, and keep the competition open. Create a networked
Emilia Romagna. OSCOM and ZEA are two examples of this. I’d like to see LOTS more.